Bitbucket from January 2000
"Anonymous web-surfing should be a criminal offense"
A Dutch Member of Parliament, Oussama Cherribi, who formerly opposed Scientology by posting its copyrighted documents on his website, came out against anonymity on the net. Without anonymity, the materials that elevated Scientology from a mere wealthy "religious" cult to a butt of net.scorn never would have come to light -- let alone into Cherribi's hands. His outburst was provoked by an announcement by XS4ALL, the venerable Dutch ISP with roots in the "Hacktic" techno-anarchist collective, that it would participate in Zero Knowledge Systems' Freedom Network, a new client-server network for obscuring the activities and identities of netizens as they go about their net.business.
The Dutch e-zine _Webwereld_ quoted him as saying, "Anonymous web surfing should be a criminal offense, and unlimited anonymity should become a penal offense." The predictable justification: "It is a matter of the security of the state." We expect many more "official" reactions of this kind to Freedom; but, given the spotty track record of hysterical law-and-order fanatics, we won't regard their criticisms as authoritative recommendations that Freedom really is as good as we would like.
Area 51 Telecom Connection Abducted
Hacker News Network has reported a solid confirmation that "Area 51," the legendary home of all kinds of U.S. military UFO-related wackiness, does indeed exist. An "Initial Service Disruption Report" filed by the Sprint Western Operations Network Operations Center lists "Military Base Area 51" as one of three geographical areas affected by a five-hour telecom outage on 22 December 1999. The cause? A circuit breaker had been "turned off." (But who did it? And why? And why was the "Steps Taken to Prevent Recurrence" section of the form left blank?)
The truth is out there--but it can't be reached by this method. Please hang up and try again later.
WiReD: The Next Generation
In an article about a lawsuit filed under the U.S. Congress's new "cyberpiracy" law, Wired News baldly states that "Since the earliest days of the commercial Internet, cybersquatters have been buying potentially valuable domain names, intending to resell them at a sizable profit." Indeed: the ur-"cybersquatter" was of course Wired's own correspondent Josh Quittner, who registered mcdonalds.com in mid-1994 and tried desperately to interest McDonalds in it--for an article for Wired. McDonalds told Quittner, "The closest thing I've got for you is We are considering it. But no decision has been made."
É-commerce?
Nunames, the domain registrar in charge of the Niue country code ".nu", has announced that as of 10 January it will begin accepting domain names that include certain diacritical characters--"Ö, Ä, Å, Ü, Ñ - And More," as they put it--on a "beta" basis. While we at Bitbucket think expansion of the namespace is a Good Thing[TM] (®), particularly if it involves moving beyond the delights of ASCII ("A" for "American"), we're a bit dubious about this project. Aside from the fact the e-commerce-driven putsch of net.governance is effectively rendering every domain registration "beta"--who knows when some new e-tailer will decide it fancies your domain?--Nunames doesn't say which character encoding standard their extended system uses: DOS Codepage 850, Macintosh, ISO-Latin-1, Unicode, Unicode with UTF-8 (to say nothing of Microsoft's standards, which are as ever-changing as the Style Council's moods...). But these are "known problems," and we're just picking nits. Really, we're eager to see a California judge of Latin descent rule on whether Ámázóñ.nu is a trademark infringement.
Bitbucket - Data In Hopeless Turmoil
Bitbucket from January 2000
Bitbucket Nr.1 (last Millennium)
http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/5/5592/1.html
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